In a complex system environment pertaining to elevators, deriving power and, in particular, trying to conserve and optimize its use is one the many issues that is of paramount importance and interest.
Another important factor to consider is the reduction of signaling and power cable wiring within elevator systems. As the complexity of power and signal wiring increases within an elevator system, so does the installation cost, the installation time, the maintenance cost, the maintenance time, and the overall fault detection overhead.
There are, however, current systems that reduce wiring complexity by utilizing hall fixture devices that operate using rf transceivers. The use of rf as a data or information carrier, therefore, provides a means for reducing wiring complexity. Although these systems purport to reduce wiring complexity, they introduce other challenges, such as, reliability concerns of the rf communication link due to interference, and the provision of electrical power to the rf transceiver devices that are interfaced to the hall fixtures. Therefore, there is a need for providing elevator hall fixtures that reduce the complexity of using discrete wiring. Particularly, there is a need for an elevator system that uses the existing elevator system's wiring infrastructure to provide not only a reliable communication link for the hall fixture devices, but to also furnish a means for providing electrical power to these devices'
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to provide a hall fixture device that is capable of using the existing wiring infrastructure for signal communications.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a hall fixture device that is capable of extracting power from various sources and resources of electrical power within the existing elevator system infrastructure.